It is perfectly true, as was urged by the late Sir Alfred Lyall, that in India and elsewhere distinguished men may to this day be deified; that ancestor-worship played a great part in God-making; and that tribal Gods are in many cases probably evolved from distinguished chiefs. But such cases really defeat the inference drawn from them. Such God-making can in no instance be shown ever to have set up what can reasonably be termed a world-religion. The world-religions are the product of a far more protracted and complex causation. They grow from far further-reaching roots. Above all, they have never grown up without the services either of a numerous priesthood or of Sacred Books, or of both.
Is it then contended that a Sacred Book must represent the originative teaching of a real person and his disciples? It may or may not; but what does not at all follow is that the personality deified or extolled in the Sacred Book was real. Mohammed was a real person: he made no claim to deity: he acclaimed an established God. The names of Zoroaster and Buddha were probably not those of real persons: the first figures as a cult-building priest; the second as a Teacher, enshrined from the first in a luxuriant myth, whence his practical deification. In both cases the specific centre of the religion is the Book or Books; and it is beyond question that in both cases many hands wrought on these. To say that only a primary personality of abnormal greatness could have inspired the writing of the books is really equivalent to saying that there must have been a historical Jehovah to account for the Old Testament, and a historical Allah to account for the Koran. Let it be freely granted that the writers of Sacred Books were in many cases remarkable personalities. That is a totally different proposition from the one we are considering.
The claim that the gospels could only have originated round the memory of an inspiring and love-creating personality is in effect an evasion of the multitudinous facts of hierology. The European who sees nothing in the fact that the mythic Krishna is loved by millions of Hindoos; that in ages of antiquity millions of worshippers were absorbed in the love of Dionysos, mutilated themselves for Attis, and wept for Adonis, is not really ready for a verdict on what “must” have been as regards the building up of any cult. Are the Psalms, once more, a testimony to the historicity of Jehovah, or is the hymn of Hippolytos to Artemis, in Euripides, a proof of anything but that men can love an imagination?
The special claim for a historical Jesus arises out of the very fact that Jesus alone among the Saviour Gods of antiquity (Buddha being excluded from that category) is celebrated in a set of Sacred Books in which he figures as at once a Sacrificed God and a Teaching God.[22] But the worships of the Saviours Dionysos and Herakles and Adonis, without Sacred Books (apart from temple liturgies), were as confident as the worship of Jesus. Is the production of Sacred Books in itself any more of a testimony to a Saviour God’s human actuality than the worship with which they are associated?
Historically speaking, the emergence of Sacred Books as accompaniments of a popular cultus is a result of special culture conditions. In the case of Judaism these have never been scientifically traced, by reason of the presuppositions of the past.[23] But we can trace later cases. Early Christism founded primarily on the Sacred Books of Judaism; and it needed to produce books of its own if it was to survive as against the overshadowing parent cult. Save for these books, Christism would have disappeared as did Mithraism, of which the scanty hieratic literature remained occult, liturgical, unpopular, where Christism was committed to publicity by the Jewish lead. To make of Sacred Books produced under those special conditions a special argument for the historicity of their contents, or of their narrative groundwork, is to embrace the fallacy of the single instance. And when the contents utterly fail to sustain the tests of rational documentary criticism, to fall back on a “must” for certification of the actuality of the figure they deify is merely to renounce critical reason.
The rational problem is to account historically for the projection as a whole, to explain the main features and as many minor details as may be, as we explain the “personality” and the myth of Herakles or Samson or Adonis, the doctrines and fictions of the Books of Ruth and Esther, the religions of Krishna and Mithra and Quetzalcoatl. We are now compendiously to make the attempt.
M. Loisy has declared[24] that “One can explain to oneself Jesus: one cannot explain to oneself those who invented him.” In the previous volume it has been contended that M. Loisy has decisively failed to “explain Jesus” as a possible person: in this we essay to explain “those who invented him.” M. Loisy is an illustrious New-Testament scholar: he is not a mythologist or a comparative hierologist. It is very likely that he would find it difficult to explain to himself those who invented Tezcatlipoca; but it would hardly follow that Tezcatlipoca was not invented. In point of fact, a large portion of M. Loisy’s own important critical performance consists precisely in explaining away as inventions a multitude of items in the gospel narrative. He can understand invention of many parts, and admits that unless removed they make an incongruous whole. There is really no more difficulty in explaining the other parts as similar inventions than in explaining these. Thus the alleged difficulty is illusory.
The occupation of “explaining to oneself” imaginary beings has been the occupation of theologians through whole millenniums. There can still be found even a hierologist or two who believe in the historicity of Krishna; as the judicious Mosheim in the eighteenth century confidently believed in the historicity of Mercury and Mithra. Those—and they are many—who are now content to see myth in the figures of Mithra and Krishna, with or without the nimbus of Sacred Books, may on that score consent to consider the thesis of this volume.
It will be no adequate answer to that to say, as will doubtless be said, that the outline of the evolution of the myth is unsatisfying. In the very nature of the case, the connections of the data must be speculative. It may well be that those here attempted—some of them modifications of previous theories—will have to be at various points reshaped; and I invite the reader to weigh carefully the views of Professors Drews and Smith where I diverge from them. The complete establishment of a historical construction will be a long and difficult task. But in its least satisfying aspect the myth-theory is a scientific substitution for what is wholly dissatisfying—the entirely unhistorical construction furnished by the gospels.
That has been under revision for a hundred and fifty years, with an outlay of labour that is appalling to think of, in view of the utter futility of the search—or, let us say, the labour in proportion to the result, for toil even upon false clues has yielded some knowledge that avails for rectification. But the labour has meant a steadily dwindling confidence in a dwindling residuum of supposed fact; though every shortening of the line of defence has evoked furious outcry from the unthinking faithful. The first pious framers of “harmonies” of the gospels were indignantly told by the more stupid pious that there was no strife to harmonize: the Schmiedels and Loisys of to-day, striving their hardest to save something by rational methods from the rational advance, are execrated by those who believe more than they. The more instructed believers are as warm in their resentment of the latest and coolest negative criticism as were their fathers towards the contemptuous exposure of the contradictions of “inspiration.” Anger, it would seem, always leaps to the help of shaken confidence. Let the believer perpend.